Others who have tried to cut themselves off from the internet reported finding a
sudden abundance of free time. Yet, as they went along they simply found other
ways to procrastinate. Eventually returning to their previous level of
productivity. Maybe the new distraction was more meaningful. Or maybe it wasn’t.
But it does reveal that a great deal of your productive hours are really a
measurement of your own willpower.

I found a similar effect. The first month was filled with an abundance of free
time. My day job became that much more productive. My evenings had much more
time for reading. Then two things began to slowly fade in (1) I began to cheat
on the fast. Slowly Reddit slipped in. A quick peak at Facebook. (2) I began to
find that my productivity gains slowly faded, filled instead with just idle
distraction. If I wasn’t distracted by Reddit, then I was at least distracted by
a sudden urge to organize my pens or muddle through my day planner.

Here is the thing that I found most interesting. Facebook really wasn’t that bad
of a culprate. It was easy to cut Facebook out. It was easy to start reading
Facebook again. Facebook was, ultimately, still rather useful with regards to
keeping up on the lives of friends and family. My major gripe with Facebook a
year ago was the sheer amount of promoted content. The feed was full top to
bottom with clickbait articles and random nonsenses being shared endlessly. It
made me miss the endless parades of baby pictures. Yet, it seems someone at
Facebook realized that this was bad for business and started to turn the
ship around. There is still random promoted content on the feed. But I am happy
to say that I am starting to see more and more content contributed by friends.
Which leads me to being willing to keep Facebook around for yet another year.

News aggregators though? Sheer evil. Might as well be a slot machine for
internet addicts. Every refresh of Reddit brings up new articles, memes, and
comments. Hacker News and Slashdot are at least a little more professionally
orientated but they too form a kind of bottomless bowl. Once you take a hit of
Reddit, an hour or two is gone instantly.

Post fast, I realized that Reddit just had to go. Hacker News and Slashdot were
managable. I’ve weened myself down to only reading Reddit on the phone when I
truly, truly have nothing better to do. The common demoninator on Reddit today
is the absolute bottom of the barrel. The shilling is through the roof. There
isn’t a post that doesn’t have some viral web marketer squatting on it trying to
hawk their wares. The last thread I read was some stupid joke about balding
dominated by comments sounding eerily like ad copy, promoting this or that
product to bring back your hair.

Which brings me to the amazingness that is the RSS feeder. RSS turns the
relationship of the news aggregator upside down. Rather than the news aggregator
pushing news to me. The mob, or more likely an army of marketers, deciding what
news ought to be read. I can instead pull the news to me. I get to decide the
writers who I will read. The topics to be read.

This breaks the addictive quality of the new aggregator, but also allows me to
stop wasting time reading low-quality comments and low-quality posts. I can
focus my attention on particular publishesr, such as NPR, BBC, or local
newspapers like the Jackson Hole News & Guide and the Silver City Daily Press. I
can pull in international feeds like L’actualite and Le Monde. I can also focus
my attention on a particular author like Will Wheaton, Stephen Fry or Brad
Warner. I can create huge collections of slowly updated blogs that post long
form essays once or twice a year or faster blogs that publish once or twice a
day. I can pull in writers on esoteric topics that interest me like Rust
development, Zen, Asian History, Anime, or Roleplaying. I can even add Slashdot
and Hacker News – get the article prepackaged without the temptation to waste
time wallowing about in the comments.

Essentially, I very quickly found myself thinking more and more about the types
of things that I read online, the topics that interested me, and seeking out a
diverse selection of the best writers in those topics. I stopped browsing
whatever popped up in front of me. It became a much more intentional
relationship with the media.

Round #2 of the Social Media Fast

My thoughts are, to do this again. Make it an annual thing. No social media for
three months! August. September. October. Which will be great. I’ll miss all of
the election nonsense. Read the articles on my RSS feed. Make my own call on the
whole business.

The sites that are verboten:

Facebook

Twitter

Reddit

Slashdot

Hacker News

Youtube

And any other site that has characteristics that resemble any of these sites.
StackOverflow gets a pass. I can’t do my job without StackOverflow.

But let’s take this one step further this year. Google has gone evil. So let’s
cut out google.com as well and switch to Duck Duck Go or Qwant for my search
engine. I’m still giving the various other google products a pass: e-mail,
docs, drive. Those I, unfortunately need for work. But I can intentionally
choose to try using a different search engine for three months.

About

Joseph Hallenbeck attended the RTIS program at DigiPen Institute of Technology, studied Victorian-era literature at the University of Oxford, and graduated from Augustana University in Sioux Falls, SD with a B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature. He has worked as an interpretive ranger, naturalist, and caver for the National Park Service and is now employed as a Software Engineer at Research Square in Durham, NC.